Pius VII could not, however, relinquish all claims to the confiscated lands without compensation. Hence the engagement entered into by the French Government to pay in perpetuity adequate subsidies for the maintenance of an adequate number of bishops and parochial clergy. This was the consideration [the _do ut des_] for which the Pope, as supreme chief of the Catholic Church, gave a clear title to the confiscated lands. The payment of these subsidies became henceforth a charge on the public treasury, a portion of the national debt, just like the payment of interest on state bonds. The suppression, at the present moment, of these subsidies in the case of the Bishop of Nice and many other bishops and hundreds of parish priests is a partial repudiation of this part of the public debt. And there is nothing to prevent the repudiation of the whole. “What do we care for legality?” “We have the majority,” were utterances which passed unrebuked in the Chambers recently. They can imprison and kill the Roman Catholic clergy. The First Republic did both most freely. So did Nero and Bismarck. It also tried the experiment of a national schismatic Church and failed. The Third Republic openly proclaims its intention of renewing the experiment in which Abbé Gregoire, with _carte blanche_ from the Republic, so signally failed a hundred years ago. To understand the abnormal conditions prevailing in France, we must remember that France is in revolution since a century or more. The Revolution of 1793 was essentially a religious movement, born of the monstrous alliance of the French ruling classes with the spirit of libertinage and infidelity. It destroyed the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime, merely because they were associated with the Catholic Church, whose destruction was their main object--a means to an end. The final purpose was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, liberty. The ideal, then as now, is the omnipotent State, sole purveyor, teacher, and preacher. This may seem exaggerated, but it is strictly the spirit and the tendency of the Revolution since 1789. Napoleon was the offspring and the incarnation of the Revolution. After Austerlitz, he threw off the mask, and clearly showed his intention of establishing state despotism on the ruins of all civil and religious liberty. There was but one will in Europe that resisted him. Alone of all the sovereigns of Europe, the aged, defenceless Sovereign Pontiff refused to enter into his continental _blocus_ against England, declaring that all Christians were his children, and we know the story of his long martyrdom at Fontainebleau. Capefigue, in the third of his ten volumes on the Consulate and the Empire, comments on the singular fact that the First Republic always bitterly antagonized the United States, and he explains this “singular phenomenon” by the reason that the former was a government of tyranny and anarchy, whereas the Republic of Washington was one of law and